I had a look at the organization of the files on the hard drive of the Jukebox. It might be that you don't even need to copy 65,536 sectors for the upgrade procedure. It seems as if half of that is already enough. I haven't tried that yet though.

I also found out how the MP3-files are stored on the hard drive. Seemingly the Jukebox OS is using a granularity of 256 kB for file storage. Music files are therefore stored in chunks of 256 kiloByte. This is not a very economical procedure that wastes a lot of hard drive space. The files are simply stored sequentially and it is easy to find their start and end, since each MP3-file starts with the entry 'ID3' and ends with another tag-entry as well. It would be pretty easy to write a little program that can read all the MP3-files from a Jukebox hard drive, but it would always require the previous disassembly of the player.

Summary

For me Creative's Nomad Jukebox is the gadget of the year. It is not exactly cheap, but one of the few items that are really worth their money. Regardless if you want to listen to music on the beach, in your car or on your home stereo system, the Nomad Jukebox gives you the chance to do all that while choosing from at least 100 hours of music. Just imagine how much space 100 CDs would take and then take another look at the little Nomad Jukebox. It's simply fantastic (and I think I have never ever said that about any product before!). The real kick however is the unwanted upgrade path that Creative gave its big MP3-player. It is really simple to equip the Jukebox with a larger hard drive. 20 GB of music equals over 400 CD albums!! Imagine carrying that much music around with you wherever you go!

Still it wouldn't be a typical Tom-review if there weren't at least some things that I have to criticize.

Creative needs to get the Windows 2000 bug out of its Playcenter2 software and the upload of play lists could be made a lot easier and more convenient as well. An IEEE 1394 (FireWire) version of the Jukebox would be very helpful too, because it simply takes too long to load the Jukebox. I would also appreciate if Creative would unlock the transfer of files from the Jukebox to the computer. I can't see any legal reason against that. Once in a while the Jukebox crashes, especially while you are uploading files. In this case you either need to cut the power supply (remove batteries) or press the little RESET-button. I hope that future firmware for the Jukebox will be less buggy. Finally I'm asking for headphones that are adequate to the quality of MP3. The headphone output of the Jukebox should be higher than those few 100 mW also.

In closing I'd like to say a few words about the usage of MP3. This audio format has already won, regardless how much the music industry might hate it. Thus I think it is about time that computer-illiterate people can start enjoying the huge advantages of MP3 as well. As great as the Nomad Jukebox may be, it still requires a computer. This leaves all the other music-lovers that don't have a computer out in the rain. It is about time for a major change!